The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)

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By Jacques Lacan TELEVISION THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK I THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK II THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK III THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK VII ECRITS: A SELECTION FEMININE SEXUALITY THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

THE SEMINAR OF

JACQUES LACAN Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller

BOOK VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 TRANSLATED WITH NOTES BY

Dennis Porter

W • W • NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK

LONDON

Originally published in French as Le Seminaire, Livre VU Vethique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960 by Les Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1986 Copyright © 1986 by Les Editions du Seuil English translation copyright © 1992 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. First American edition 1992 AU rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published as a Norton paperback 1997 Library of Congress Caialoging-m-Publication Data Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 [Ethique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960. English] The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 / translated with notes by Dennis Porter.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The Seminar of Jacques Lacan ; bk. 7) Translation of: L'éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960. 1. Psychoanalysis—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Sublimation. 3. Pleasure. 4. Tragic, The. 5. Ethics—Psychological aspects. I. Series: Lacan, Jacques, 1901Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. English ; bk. 7 BF173.L14613 1988 bk. 7 [BF 175] 150.19 5 s—dc20 [150.19 5] 91-46897 ISBN 0-393-03357-0 ISBN 0-393-31613-0 pbk. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W.W. Norton & Company Ltd. 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

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CONTENTS

Translator's note I

Outline of the seminar

page vii 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE THING

II III IV V VI

Pleasure and reality Rereading the Entwurf Das Ding Dos Ding (II) On the moral law

19 35 43 57 71

THE PROBLEM OF SUBLIMATION VII VIII IX X XI XII

Drives and lures The object and the thing On creation ex nihilo Marginal comments Courtly love as anamorphosis A critique of Bernfeld

87 101 115 128 139 155

THE PARADOX OF JOUISSANCE XIII XIV XV XVI

The death of God Love of one's neighbor The jouissance of transgression The death drive

167 179 191 205

Contents

VI

XVII XVIII

The function of the good The function of the beautiful

218 231

THE ESSENCE OF TRAGEDY A Commentary on Sophocles's Antigone XIX XX XXI

The splendor of Antigone The articulations of the play Antigone between two deaths

243 257 270

THE TRAGIC DIMENSION OF ANALYTICAL EXPERIENCE XXII XXIII XXIV

The demand for happiness and the promise of analysis The moral goals of psychoanalysis The paradoxes of ethics or Have you acted in conformity with your desire?

291 302 311

Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

326 327 331

TRANSLATORS NOTE

Some of the problems of translating Jacques Lacan's Seminars into English have already been pointed out by the translators of Seminars I and II, John Forester and Sylvana Tomaselli, and there is no point in repeating their helpful comments here. It is, however, important to recall that the Seminars now in the process of being translated were delivered from notes to an audience that for the most part had been following the progress of Lacan's thought over many years and was composed to a great extent of psychoanalysts or psychoanalysts in training. These circumstances account in part for his nonacademic mode of exposition and the frequent complexity of the syntax. They also explain the closeness Lacan apparently felt to his audience, the assumptions he was able to make about the knowledge his listeners possessed, the frequent references to previous Seminars or to other activities of the Société Française de Psychanalyse, and the apparent allusiveness of some of his remarks. The latter in particular seems to derive both from what he felt he could take for granted among those who knew his work well and from a pedagogical style that made great demands on a listener. Jacques-Alain Miller's French edition of the Ethique de la Psychanalyse is without a critical apparatus, like the other Lacan Seminars that have so far been published. Miller reproduces Lacan's lectures virtually unmediated, and it seemed proper to model the English edition of the work on the French. As a consequence, footnotes have been kept to a minimum; they are chiefly limited to linguistic difficulties where for one reason or another English is unable to render fully the significance of the French-the most obvious of such cases is Lacan's not infrequent plays on words. However, a bibliography of authors and works cited by Lacan in the course of the Seminar is included. I have also followed the French edition in leaving German and Greek words in the original where Lacan did so in the context of analyzing German or Greek texts; in most cases, he gave at the same time a French equivalent or a paravii

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Translator's Note

phrase of a concept's meaning. Only in the case of tides have I given the English translation in brackets after the first occurrence. The task of the translator is, I take it, a critically self-effacing one that insofar as possible avoids the temptation to play editor by reducing ambiguities or by "naturalizing" the strangeness of an original in its passage into the native idiom. Thus, the goals I gave myself were accuracy rather than elegance and a flexibility of tone that matches the different registers of Lacan's expository style. The excitement for those who encounter his Seminars in the original French is in the experience of a thought in the making. And it is important to render in the English this liveliness of a distinguished mind at work before an audience, even at the occasional cost of some awkwardnesses. The difficulty was in trying to render in a different linguistic code a captivating spoken word that sometimes meanders, throws out asides, refers backwards or anticipates future problems, moves through passages dense with difficult ideas, narrates an illustrative comic anecdote, draws out the forgotten etymological significance of a word or resorts suddenly to popular speech. The pleasure for the translator is in discovering equivalents for such movements within the very different resources of his own language. It is for the most part not Lacan's psychoanalytic or philosophical discourse that causes difficulties, but his syntax and, given that the Norton edition of the Seminars has as its potential audience the English-speaking world as a whole, his use of familiar language and colloquialisms. As far as the former is concerned, Lacan frequendy uses French prepositions and prepositional phrases in startlingly new ways; thus one of the most difficult words to translate turned out to be "de." As for Lacan's colloquialisms, it seemed to me important wherever possible to find equivalents that were not too obviously recognizable as "Americanisms" or as "Britishisms," but have a more general currency. Finally, a few minor errors in the French have been corrected in the translation. I would like to thank my colleague Edward S. Phinney for help with the Greek and Susan Barrows both for her editorial support and for a careful reading of the manuscript. DENNIS PORTER

Amtierst, Massachusetts, October 1991

I Outline of the seminar THE ATTRACTION OF TRANSGRESSION1 PROM ARISTOTLE TO FREUD THE REAL THE THREE IDEALS

I announced that the title of my seminar this year was The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. I do not think that this is a subject whose choice is in any way surprising in itself, although it does leave open for some of you the question of what I might have in mind. It was certainly not without some hesitation and even trepidation that I decided to tackle it. I, in fact, decided to do so because the subject follows directly from my seminar of last year, if it is true that we can consider that work as completely finished. In any case, we must move forward. Given all that is implied by the phrase, the ethics of psychoanalysis will allow me, far more than anything else, to test the categories that I believe enable me, through my teaching, to give you the most suitable instruments for understanding what is new both in Freud's work and in the experience of psychoanalysis that derives from it. New in relation to what? In relation to something that is both very general and very specific. Very general to the extent that the experience of psychoanalysis is highly significant for a certain moment in the history of man, namely, the one we are living in, although this does not imply we are able far from it - to specify what the collective work we are engaged in means. Very specific, on the other hand, like our daily work, namely, in the way in which we have to respond in experience to what I have taught you to articulate as a demand, a patient's demand, to which our response gives an exact meaning. And in our response itself we must maintain the strictest discipline, so as not to let its deeply unconscious meaning be adulterated by that demand. 1 Lacan's word here, "la faute," is particularly difficult to put into English because of the great range of its potential equivalents - from wrong, error, mistake to blame, misconduct and offense - and because the most obvious choice does not have the moral resonances of the French. "The Attraction of the Fault" not only does not suggest anything, but even manages to sound like pidgin English. And the same is true of "The Universe of the Fault."

2

The ethics of psychoanalysis

In speaking of the ethics of psychoanalysis, I chose a word which to my mind was no accident. I might have said "morality" instead. If I say "ethics," you will soon see why. It is not because I take pleasure in using a term that is less common.

1 Let us begin by noting this - something that, in a word, makes the subject eminently accessible and even tempting. It is my belief that no one who is involved with psychoanalysis has not been drawn to treat the subject of its ethics. I am not the one who created the expression. Moreover, it is impossible not to acknowledge that we are submerged in what are strictly speaking moral problems. Our experience has led us to explore further than has been attempted before the universe of transgression. That is the expression which, with an extra adjective, my colleague Hesnard uses. He refers to the morbid universe of transgression. And it is doubtless from this morbid point of view that we approach it at its highest point. In truth, that point of view is impossible to dissociate from the universe of transgression as such. And the link between transgression and morbidity has not failed in our time to mark with its seal all thought about morals. It is even strange sometimes - something I have drawn your attention to before in my asides - to see in religious circles a certain vertigo seize those who are engaged in thinking about moral questions when they come face to face with what our experience has to offer. It is remarkable to see how they, as it were, give in to the temptation of an excessive and even comic optimism, and start to think that a decline of morbidity might lead transgression to vanish. In fact, what we are dealing with is nothing less than the attraction of transgression. And what is this transgression? It is certainly not the same as the one the patient commits with the expectation of being punished or punishing himself. When we speak of the need for punishment, we are certainly referring to a transgression which is on the path of this need and which is sought out to obtain this punishment. But that way we are only carried a little further toward some yet more obscure transgression which calls for punishment. Is it the transgression that Freud's work points to from the beginning, the murder of the father, the great myth that he places at the origin of the development of civilization? Or is it that even more obscure and original transgression for which he finds a name at the end of his work, in a word, the death instinct, to the extent that man finds himself anchored deep within to its formidable dialectic? It is between these two terms that one finds in Freud a body of thought, a

Outline of the seminar

3

development whose precise significance it will be our task to determine. But it is not, in truth, in the sphere either of practice or of theory that is to be found all that which makes me emphasize the importance of the ethical dimension in my experience and my teaching of Freud. In effect, as has been quite properly pointed out, not everything in ethics is simply related to the sense of obligation. Moral experience as such, that is to say, the reference to sanctions, puts man in a certain relation to his own action that concerns not only an articulated law but also a direction, a trajectory, in a word, a good that he appeals to, thereby engendering an ideal of conduct. All that, too, properly speaking constitutes the dimension of ethics and is situated beyond the notion of a command, beyond what offers itself with a sense of obligation. That is why I believe it necessary to relate the dimension of our experience to the contribution of those who have attempted in our time to advance moral thought I am, in fact, alluding to Fritz Rauh, whom we will be concerned with as one of our reference points in this exercise. But I am certainly not one of those who gladly sets the sense of obligation aside. If there is, in fact, something that psychoanalysis has drawn attention to, it is, beyond the sense of obligation properly speaking, the importance, I would even say the omnipresence, of a sense of guilt. Certain internal tendencies of ethical thought attempt to evade what it must be said is this disagreeable aspect of moral experience. If I am certainly not one of those who attempt to soften, blunt, or attenuate the sense of guilt, it is because in my daily experience I am too insistently brought back to it and reminded of it. It nevertheless remains true that analysis is the experience which has restored to favor in the strongest possible way the productive function of desire as such. This is so evidently the case that one can, in short, say that the genesis of the moral dimension in Freud's theoretical elaboration is located nowhere else than in desire itself. It is from the energy of desire that that agency is detached which at the end of its development will take the form of the censor. Thus something is enclosed in a circle that was imposed on us, deduced from what is most characteristic in our experience. A certain philosophy - it immediately preceded the one which is the nearest relative to the Freudian enterprise, the one which was transmitted to us in the nineteenth century - a certain eighteenth-century philosophy assumed as its task what might be called the naturalist liberation of desire. One might characterize this thought, this particularly practical thought, as that of the man of pleasure. Now the naturalist liberation of desire has failed. The more the theory, the more the work of social criticism, the more the sieve of that experience, which tended to limit obligation to certain precise functions in the social order, have raised in us the hope of relativizing the imperative, the contrary, or, in a word, conflictual character of moral experience, the more

4

The ethics of psychoanalysis

we have, in fact, witnessed a growth in the incidence of genuine pathologies. The naturalist liberation of desire has failed historically. We do notfindourselves in the presence of a man less weighed down with laws and duties than before the great critical experience of so-called libertine thought. If we find ourselves led to consider even in retrospect the experience of that man of pleasure - through reflection on what psychoanalysis has contributed to the knowledge and the circumstances of perverse experience - we will soon see that in truth everything in this moral theory was to destine it to failure. In effect, although the experience of the man of pleasure presents itself with an ideal of naturalist liberation, one has only to read the major authors - 1 mean those who in expressing themselves on the subject have adopted the boldest approaches to libertinage, and even to eroticism itself - to realize that this experience contains a note of defiance, a kind of trial by ordeal in relation to that which remains the terminal point of this argument, an undoubtedly diminished but nevertheless fixed term. And that is nothing less than the divine term. As the creator of nature, God is summoned to account for the extreme anomalies whose existence the Marquis de Sade, Mirabeau, and Diderot, among others, have drawn our attention to. This challenge, this summoning, this trial by ordeal ought not to allow any other way out than the one that was, in effect, realized historically. He who submits himself to the ordeal finds at the end its premises, namely, the Other to whom this ordeal is addressed, in the last analysis its Judge. That is precisely what gives its special tone to this literature, which presents us with the dimension of the erotic in a way that has never been achieved since, never equaled. In the course of our investigation, we definitely must submit to our judgment that which in analysis has retained an affinity with, a relationship to, and a common root with, such an experience. Here we are touching on a prespective that has been little explored in analysis. It seems that from the moment of those first soundings, from the sudden flash of light that the Freudian experience cast on the paradoxical origins of desire, on the polymorphously perverse character of its infantile forms, a general tendency has led psychoanalysts to reduce the paradoxical origins in order to show their convergence in a harmonious conclusion. This movement has on the whole characterized the progress of analytical thought to the point where it is worth asking if this theoretical progress was not leading in the end to an even more all-embracing moralism than any that has previously existed. Psychoanalysis would seem to have as its sole goal the calming of guilt although we know well through our practical experience the difficulties and obstacles, indeed the reactions, that such an approach entails. This approach involves the taming of perverse jouissance, which is assumed to emerge from

Outline of the seminar

5

the demonstration of its universality, on the one hand, and its function, on the other. No doubt the term "component," used for designating the perverse drive, is in this situation given its full weight. Last year we explored the expression "component drive"; in a whole section of our remarks we were concerned with the insights that analysis affords concerning the function of desire and with the deep finality of that really remarkable diversity, which explains the value of the catalogue of human instincts that analysis has allowed us to draw up. Perhaps the question will only be seen in sharp relief, when one compares the position that our point of view of the term desire has led us to, with that which is, for example, articulated in the work of Aristotle in connection with ethics. I will give him an important place in my discussion, including particularly that work which lays out Aristotelian ethics in its most elaborate form, the Nicomachean Ethics. There are two points in Aristotle's work in which he shows how a whole register of desire is literally situated by him outside of the field of morality. Where a certain category of desires is involved, there is, in effect, no ethical problem for Aristotle. Yet these very desires are nothing less than those notions that are situated in the forefront of our experience. A whole large field of what constitutes for us the sphere of sexual desires is simply classed by Aristotle in the realm of monstrous anomalies - he uses the term "bestiality" with reference to them. What occurs at this level has nothing to do with moral evaluation. The ethical questions that Aristotle raises are located altogether elsewhere - I will give you an idea later of their thrust and essence. That is a point of special importance. On the other hand, if one believes that the whole of Aristotle's morality has lost none of its relevance for moral theory, then one can measure from that fact how subversive our experience is, since it serves to render his theory surprising, primitive, paradoxical and, in truth, incomprehensible. But all that is just a stop on our journey. What I really want to do this morning is to give you an outline of this seminar.

2 We are faced with the question of what analysis allows us to formulate concerning the origin of morality. Is its contribution limited to the elaboration of a mythology that is more credible and more secular than that which claims to be revealed? I have in mind the reconstructed mythology of Totem and Taboo, which starts out from the experience of the original murder of the father, from the circumstances that give rise to it and its consequences. From this point of view, it is the

6

The ethics of psychoanalysis

transformation of the energy of desire which makes possible the idea of the genesis of its repression. As a result, the transgression is not in this instance just something which is imposed on us in a formal way; it is instead something worthy of our praise, felix culpay since it is at the origin of a higher complexity, something to which the realm of civilization owes its development. In short, is everything limited to the genesis of the superego whose description is formulated, perfected, deepened, and made more complex as Freud's work progresses? We will see that this genesis of the superego is not simply a psychogenesis and a sociogenesis. Indeed, it is impossible to articulate it by limiting oneself merely to the register of collective needs. Something is imposed there whose jurisdiction is to be distinguished from pure and simple social necessity - it is properly speaking something whose unique scope I am trying to make you appreciate here in terms of the relation to the signifier and to the law of discourse. We must maintain the autonomy of this term if we want to be able to locate our experience precisely or simply correctly. Here no doubt the distinction between culture and society contains something that might appear new or even divergent in comparison with what is found in a certain kind of teaching of the analytical experience. I hope, in fact, to point out to you the references to such a distinction and the scope they occupy in Freud himself, a distinction whose authority I am far from alone in promoting or emphasizing the need for. And in order to draw your attention immediately to the work in which we will take up the problem, I refer you to Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1922 and written by Freud after the working out of his second topic, that is to say after he had placed in the foreground the highly problematic notion of the death instinct. You will find expressed there in striking phrases the idea that what, in brief, happens in the progress of civilization, those discontents that are to be explored, is situated, as far as man is concerned, far above him - the man involved here being the one who finds himself at that turning point in history where Freud himself and his work are situated. We will come back to the significance of Freud's formula and I will draw your attention to its significance in the text. But I believe it to be important enough for me to point it out to you right away, and already sufficiently illuminated in my teaching, where I show the originality of the Freudian conversion in the relation of man to the logos. This Civilization and Its Discontents that I invite you to get to know or to reread in the context of Freud's work is not just a set of notes. It is not the kind of thing one grants a practitioner or a scientist somewhat indulgently, as his way of making an excursion into philosophical inquiry without our giving it all the technical importance one would accord to such a thought coming from someone who considers himself to belong to the category of

Outline of the seminar

7

philosopher. Such a view of this work of Freud's is widespread among psychoanalysts and is definitely to be rejected. Civilization and Its Discontents is an indispensable work, unsurpassed for an understanding of Freud's thought and the summation of his experience. It illuminates, emphasizes, dissipates the ambiguities of wholly distinct points of the analytical experience and of what our view of man should be - given that it is with man, with an immemorial human demand, that we have to deal on a daily basis in our experience. As I have already said, moral experience is not limited to that acceptance of necessity, to that form in which such experience presents itself in every individual case. Moral experience is not simply linked to that slow recognition of the function that was defined and made autonomous by Freud under the term of superego, nor to that exploration of its paradoxes, to what I have called the obscene and ferocious figure in which the moral agency appears when we seek it at its root. The moral experience involved in psychoanalysis is the one that is summed up in the original imperative proposed in what might be called the Freudian ascetic experience, namely, that Wo es war, soll Ich werden with which Freud concludes the second part of his Vorlesungen (Introductory Lectures) on psychoanalysis. The root of this is given in an experience that deserves the term "moral experience," and is found at the very beginning of the entry of the patient into analysis. That "I" which is supposed to come to be where "it" was, and which analysis has taught us to evaluate, is nothing more than that whose root we already found in the "I" which asks itself what it wants. It is not only questioned, but as it progresses in its experience, it asks itself that question and asks it precisely in the place where strange, paradoxical, and cruel commands are suggested to it by its morbid experience. Will it or will it not submit itself to the duty that it feels within like a stranger, beyond, at another level? Should it or should it not submit itself to the half-unconscious, paradoxical, and morbid command of the superego, whose jurisdiction is moreover revealed increasingly as the analytical exploration goes forward and the patient sees that he is committed to its path? If I may put it thus, isn't its true duty to oppose that command? One finds here something which belongs to the givens of our experience as well as to the givens of preanalysis. It is enough to see how the experience of an obsessional is structured at the beginning to know that the enigma concerning the term "duty" as such is always already formulated even before he formulates the demand for help, which is what he goes into analysis for. In truth, although the response to the problem that we are proposing here is obviously illustrated in the conflict of an obsessional, it nevertheless has a universal validity; that is why there are different ethics and there is ethical

8

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thought. It is not simply the philosopher's thought alone that seeks to justify duty, that duty on which we have shed a variety of light - genetical and originary, for example. The justification of that which presents itself with an immediate feeling of obligation, the justification of duty as such - not simply in one or other of its commands, but in the form imposed - is at the heart of an inquiry that is universal. Are we analysts simply something that welcomes the suppliant then, something that gives him a place of refuge? Are we simply, but it is already a lot, something that must respond to a demand, to the demand not to suffer, at least without understanding why? - in the hope that through understanding the subject will be freed not only from his ignorance, but also from suffering itself. Isn't it obvious that analytical ideals are normally to be found here? They are certainly not lacking. They grow in abundance. The evaluation, location, situation, and organization of values, as they say in a certain register of moral thought, that we propose to our patients, and around which we organize the assessments of their progress and the transformation of their way into a path, is supposed to be part of our work. For the moment I will mention three of these ideals. The first is the ideal of human love. Do I need to emphasize the role that we attribute to a certain idea of "love fulfilled"? That is an expression you must have learned to recognize and not only here, since, in truth, there is hardly an analyst who writes who has not drawn attention to it. And you know that I have often taken aim at the approximative and vague character, so tainted with an optimistic moralism, which marks the original articulations taking the form of the genitalization of desire. That is the ideal of genital love - a love that is supposed to be itself alone the model of a satisfying object relation: doctor-love, I would say if I wanted to emphasize in a comical way the tone of this ideology; love as hygiene, I would say, to suggest what analytical ambition seems to be limited to here. It is a problem that I will not expand on indefinitely, since I have not stopped making you think about it since this seminar began. But so as to give it a more marked emphasis, I will point out that analytical thought seems to shirk its task when faced with the convergent character of our experience. This character is certainly not deniable, but the analyst seems to find in it a limit beyond which it is difficult for him to go. To say that the problems of moral experience are entirely resolved as far as monogamous union is concerned would be a formulation that is imprudent, excessive, and inadequate. Analysis has brought a very important change of perspective on love by placing it at the center of ethical experience; it has also brought an original note, which was certainly different from the way in which love had previously been viewed by the moralistes and the philosophers in the economy of mter-

Outline of the seminar

9

human relations. Why then has analysis not gone further in the direction of the investigation of what should properly be called an erotics? That is something that deserves reflection. In this connection the topic I have placed on the agenda of our forthcoming conference, namely, feminine sexuality, is one of the clearest of signs in the development of analysis of the lack I am referring to with regard to such an investigation. It is hardly necessary to recall what Jones learned from a source that to my mind is not especially qualified, but which, believe it or not, is nevertheless supposed at the very least to have transmitted in his exact words what it heard from Freud's own mouth. Jones tells us that this person told him confidentially that one day Freud said something like "After some thirty years of experience and thought, there is still one question to which I am still unable to find an answer; it is 'Was will das Weib?' " What does woman want? Or more precisely, "What does she désire?" The term ''will" in this expression may have that meaning in German. Have we gone much further on that subject? It will not be a waste of time if I show you the kind of avoidance that the progress of research in analysis has practiced in answering a question that cannot be said to have been invented by it. Let us just say that analysis, and the thought of Freud in particular, is connected to a time that articulated this question with a special emphasis. The Ibsenian context of the end of the nineteenth century in which Freud's thought matured cannot be overlooked here. And it is, in brief, very strange that analytical experience has if anything stifled, silenced, and evaded those areas of the problem of sexuality which relate to the point of view of feminine demand. The second ideal, which is equally as remarkable in analytical experience, is what I shall call the ideal of authenticity. I do not think I need to emphasize it particularly. It will not have escaped you that if psychoanalysis is a technique of immasking, it presupposes such a point of view. But, in fact, it goes further than that. It is not simply as a path, stage, or measure of progress that authenticity suggests itself to us; it is also quite simply as a certain norm for the finished product, as something desirable and, therefore, as a value. It is an ideal, but one on which we are led to impose clinical norms that are very precise. I will illustrate the point in the very subtle observations of Helene Deutsch concerning a type of character and of personality that one cannot describe as maladjusted or as failing to meet any of the norms demanded by social relations, but whose whole attitude and behavior are visible in the recognition of whom? - of the other, of others, as if marked by that note that she calls in English "as if/' and which in German is "als ob." I am touching here on the point that a certain register - which is not defined and is not simple and cannot be situated other than from a moral perspective - is present, control-

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ling, insisted on in all our experience, and that it is necessary to calculate to what extent we are adequate to it. That something harmonious, that full presence whose lack we as clinicians can so precisely gauge - doesn't our technique stop half-way toward what is required to achieve it, the technique that I have christened "unmasking"? Wouldn't it be interesting to wonder about the significance of our absence from the field of what might be called a science of virtues, a practical reason, the sphere of common sense? For in truth one cannot say that we ever intervene in the field of any virtue. We clear ways and paths, and we hope that what is called virtue will take root there. Similarly, we have recently forged a third ideal, which I am not sure belongs to the original space of analytical experience, the ideal of non-dependence or, more precisely, of a kind of prophylaxis of dependence. Isn't there a limit there, too, a fine boundary, which separates what we indicate to an adult subject as desirable in this register and the means we accord ourselves in our interventions so that he achieves it? It is enough to remember the fundamental, constitutive reservations of the Freudian position concerning education in the broad sense. There is no doubt that all of us, and child analysts in particular, are led to encroach on this domain, to practice in the space of what I have called elsewhere an orthopedics in its etymological sense. But it is nevertheless striking that both in the means we employ and in the theoretical competence we insist on, the ethics of analysis - for there is one - involves effacement, setting aside, withdrawal, indeed, the absence of a dimension that one only has to mention in order to realize how much separates us from all ethical thought that preceded us. I mean the dimension of habits, good and bad habits. It is something we refer to very little because psychoanalytic thought defines itself in very different terms, in terms of traumas and their persistence. We have obviously learned to decompose a given trauma, impression, or mark, but the very essence of the unconscious is defined in a different register from the one which Aristotle emphasizes in the Ethics in a play on words, eOoç I TJ0OÇ. 2

There are extremely subtle distinctions that may be centered on the notion of character. Ethics for Aristode is a science of character: the building of character, the dynamics of habits and, even more, action with relation to habits, training, education. You must take a look at his exemplary work, if only to understand the difference between our modes of thought and those of one of the most eminent forms of ethical thought. 2

Both TJ0OÇ and e$o system which is turned toward endogeny and which receives its quantities. The Schlüsselneuronen are a particular form of discharge that occurs within the if/ system. Yet paradoxically that discharge has as its function to increase the pressure. He also calls these Schlüsselneuronen, motorische Neuronen and I don't think it is a mistake. They provoke stimulations that occur within the & system, a series of movements which increase the tension still further and which as a result are at the origin of current neuroses. And this is a problem which has been particularly neglected, but that is for us of great interest. We will not go into that now, however. The important point is that everything that happens here offers the paradox of being in the same place as that in which the principle of articulation by the Bahnung reigns, the same place, too, in which the whole hallucinatory phenomenon of perception occurs, of that false reality to which, in brief, the human organism is predestined. It is again in this same place that the processes oriented and dominated by reality are unconsciously formed, insofar at least as it is a question of the subject finding the path to satisfaction. In this instance satisfaction should not be confused with the pleasure principle - this is a topic that emerges, oddly enough, at the end of the third part of the text. You could not, of course, lead us right through such a rich text. When Freud sketches out what the normal functioning of the apparatus might represent, he speaks not of specific reaction but of specific action as corresponding to satisfaction. There is a big system behind that spezifische Aktion, for it can only correspond, in fact, to the refound object. We find here the foundation of the principle of repetition in Freud, and it is something we will have to come back to. That specific action will always be missing something. It is not distinguishable from what takes place when a motor reaction occurs, for it is, in effect, a reaction, a pure act, the discharge of an action. There is a very long passage that I will have occasion to come back to and to distill for you. There is no more vibrant commentary on the gap that is inherent in human experience, on the distance that is manifested in man between the articulation of a wish and what occurs when his desire sets out on the path of its realization. Freud expresses there the reason why there is always something that is far from finding satisfaction and which doesn't include the characteristics sought in a specific action. And he concludes with the words - I seem to remember that they are the last words of his paper -

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"monotonous quality." Compared with anything the subject seeks out, that which occurs in the domain of motor discharge always has a diminished character. We cannot avoid giving that remark the approbation of the most profound moral experience. By way of concluding these thoughts today, I will draw your attention to the analogy that exists between, on the one hand, that search for an archaic - one might almost say a regressive - quality of indefinable pleasure which animates unconscious instinct as a whole and, on the other, that which is realized and satisfying in the fullest of senses, in the moral sense as such. That is far more than an analogy; it reaches a level of profundity which has perhaps never previously been articulated as such. December 2> 19S9

IV Das Ding SACHE UND WORT NIEDERSCHRIFTEN NEBENMENSCH FREMDE

I am going to try to speak to you about the thing - das Ding. If I introduce this term, it is because there are certain ambiguities, certain insufficiencies, in relation to the true meaning in Freud of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle; that is to say in relation to the material which I am trying to explore with you this year, so as to make you understand its importance for our practice as an ethics. And these ambiguities have to do with something that is of the order of the signifier and even of the order of language. What we need here is a concrete, positive and particular signifier. And I don't find anything in the French language - I would be grateful to those who might be sufficiently stimulated by these remarks to suggest a solution - anything that could correspond to the subtle opposition in German, which it is not easy to bring out, between the two terms that mean "thing" - das Ding and die Sache.

1 We have only one word in French, the word "la chose" (thing), which derives from the Latin word "causa." Its etymological connection to the law suggests to us something that presents itself as the wrapping and designation of the concrete. There is no doubt that in German, too, "thing" in its original sense concerns the notion of a proceeding, deliberation, or legal debate. Das Ding may imply not so much a legal proceeding itself as the assembly which makes it possible, the Volksversammlung. Don't imagine that this use of etymology, these insights, these etymological soundings, are what I prefer to guide myself by - although Freud does remind us all the time that in order to follow the track of the accumulated experience of tradition, of past generations, linguistic inquiry is the surest vehicle of the transmission of a development which marks psychic reality. Current practice, taking note of the use of the signifier in its synchrony, is 43

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infinitely more precious to us. We attach a far greater weight to the way in which Ding and Sache are used in current speech. Moreover, if we look up an etymological dictionary, we will find that Sache, too, originally had to do with a legal proceeding. Sache is the thing that is juridically questioned or, in our vocabulary, the transition to the symbolic order of a conflict between men. Nevertheless, the two terms are not at all equivalent. For that matter you may have noted last time in Mr. Lefèvre-Pontalis's remarks a quotation of terms whose thrust, as he brought out in his presentation, was to raise this question, it seems to me, in opposition to my doctrine - and it is all the more praiseworthy in his case since he doesn't know German. It had to do with that passage in Freud's article entitled "The Unconscious," in which the representation of things, Sachvorstellung, is on every occasion opposed to that of words, Wortvorstellung. I will not enter today into the discussion of the factors that would allow one to respond to that passage, so often invoked at least in the form of a question mark, by those of you who are inspired by my lectures to read Freud. It is a passage which appears to them to constitute an objection to the emphasis I place on signifying articulation as providing the true structure of the unconscious. The passage in question seems to go against that, since it opposes Sachvorstellung, as belonging to the unconscious, to Wortvorstellung, as belonging to the preconscious. I would just beg those who stop at that passage - the majority of you presumably do not go and verify in Freud's texts what I affirm here in my commentaries - I would beg them to read together, one after the other, the article called "Die Verdrängung* or "Repression," which precedes the article on the unconscious, then that article itself, before arriving at the passage involved. I will just note for the rest of you that it has precisely to do with the question that the schizophrenic's attitude poses for Freud, that is to say, the manifestly extraordinary prevalence of affinities between words in what one might call the schizophrenic world. Everything that I have just discussed seems to me to lead in only one direction, namely, that Verdrängung operates on nothing other than signifiers. The fundamental situation of repression is organized around a relationship of the subject to the signifier. As Freud emphasizes, it is only from that perspective that it is possible to speak in a precise, analytical sense - I would call it operational - of unconscious and conscious. He realizes that the special situation of the schizophrenic, more clearly than that of any other form of neurosis, places us in the presence of the problem of representation. I will perhaps have the opportunity to come back to this text later. But you will note that by offering the solution he seems to be offering in opposing Wortvorstellung to Sachvorstellung, there is a problem, an impasse, that Freud

Das Ding

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himself emphasizes and that can be explained by the state of linguistics in his time. He, nevertheless, understood and formulated admirably the distinction to be made between the operation of language as a function - namely, the moment when it is articulated and, in effect, plays an essential role in the preconscious - and the structure of language, as a result of which those elements put in play in the unconscious are organized. In between, those coordinations are set up, those Bahnungen, that concatenation, which dominate its whole economy. I have digressed too much, since today I only want to restrict myself to the remark that Freud speaks of Sachvorstellung and not Dingvorstellung. Moreover, it is no accident if the Sachvorstellungen are linked to Wortvorstellungen, since it tells us that there is a relationship between thing and word. The straw of words only appears to us as straw insofar as we have separated it from the grain of things, and it was first the straw which bore that grain. I don't want to begin developing a theory of knowledge here, but it is obvious that the things of the human world are things in a universe structured by words, that language, symbolic processes, dominate and govern all. When we seek to explore the frontier between the animal and the human world, it is apparent to what extent the symbolic process as such doesn't function in the animal world - a phenomenon that can only be a matter of astonishment for us. A difference in the intelligence, the flexibility, and the complexity of the apparatuses involved cannot be the only means of explaining that absence. That man is caught up in symbolic processes of a kind to which no animal has access cannot be resolved in psychological terms, since it implies that we first have a complete and precise knowledge of what this symbolic process means. The Sache is clearly the thing, a product of industry and of human action as governed by language. However implicit they may first be in the genesis of that action, things are always on the surface, always within range of an explanation. To the extent that it is subjacent to and implicit in every human action, that activity of which things are the fruit belongs to the preconscious order, that is to say, something that our interest can bring to consciousness, on condition that we pay enough attention to it, that we take notice of it. The word is there in a reciprocal position to the extent that it articulates itself, that it comes to explain itself beside the thing, to the extent also that an action - which is itself dominated by language, indeed by command - will have separated out this object and given it birth. Sache and Wort are, therefore, closely linked; they form a couple. Das Ding is found somewhere else. I would like today to show you this Ding in life and in the reality principle that Freud introduces at the beginning of his thought and that persists to the end. I will point out the reference to it in a given passage of the Entwurf on

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the reality principle and in the article entitled "Die Verneinung" or "Dénégation" in which it is an essential point. This Ding is not in the relationship - which is to some extent a calculated one insofar as it is explicable - that causes man to question his words as referring to things which they have moreover created. There is something different in das Ding. What one finds in das Ding is the true secret. For the reality principle has a secret that, as Lefèvre-Pontalis pointed out last time, is paradoxical. If Freud speaks of the reality principle, it is in order to reveal to us that from a certain point of view it is always defeated; it only manages to affirm itself at the margin. And this is so by reason of a kind of pressure that one might say, if things didn't, in fact, go much further, Freud calls not "the vital needs" as is often said in order to emphasize the secondary process - but die Not des Lebens in the German text. An infinitely stronger phrase. Something that wishes. "Need" and not "needs." Pressure, urgency. The state of Not is the state of emergency in life. This Not des Lebens intervenes at the level of the secondary process, but in a deeper way than through that corrective activity; it intervenes so as to determine the QTJ level - the quantity of energy conserved by the organism in proportion to the response - which is necessary for the conservation of life. Take note that it is at the level of secondary process that the level of this necessary determination is exercised. Let us return to the reality principle that is thus invoked from the point of view of its necessity effect. This remark puts us on the track of what I call its secret, namely, the following: As soon as we try to articulate the reality principle so as to make it depend on the physical world to which Freud's purpose seems to require us to relate it, it is clear that it functions, in fact, to isolate the subject from reality. We find in it nothing more than that which biology, in effect, teaches us, namely, that the structure of a living being is dominated by a process of homeostasis, of isolation from reality. Is that all Freud has to tell us when he speaks of the functioning of the reality principle? Apparently, yes. And he shows us that neither the quantitative element nor the qualitative element in reality enters the realm - the term he uses is Räch - of the secondary process. Exterior quantity enters into contact with the apparatus called the